Long on long, Short on short

 Typically humans tend to be positive on the long term and negative on the short term. Is this just my opinion? let's see.

1. Stock markets have a typical upward drift over the long term. Given the underlying sentiment, it is safe to assume humans are positive on the long term.
2. Humans respond to negative news ( short term) more and faster. Negative items have higher views/ engagement/curiosity. Which newspaper/news channel gets more eyeballs saying everything is good?
3. A common perception is that we have more control over the immediate/short term than long term ( Is this perception the truth, is another matter!). A long term weight reduction plan gets lesser attention than an instant gratification. More effort/money is spent globally on cures than prevention. Probably because we don't believe something bad may happen in the long term. Armageddon predictions by the cults are considered funny at best and ignored.
4. Our own attention spans tend to focus more on the short term . A game that gets done in an hour or less has more viewers than a game that runs for days and weeks.

It is probably this view that is continually shortening the cycles of consumption, economy, entertainment, pursuits that the true tectonic human endeavors are ignored.

The 3 truths

 Be it Pulitzer winning journalism, the judiciary,science, philosophy : all of them pursue truth. The problem with the truth is there are many versions of it. Understanding these versions help us understand reality and solve problems better. How?

Let us take a few examples to appreciate these better. Few years ago, world believed that someone who is good at many things will survive and grow. Multi taskers, Conglomerates, Super Apps, Jacks of all, Generalist MBAs... Firms that provided products across market segments, value/price spectrum were valued highly. ( General Electric, Samsung...).It was the reality and truth for some time. Over a period, those were found to be lacking depth/moat and were pummeled by specialists. ( Apple, Tesla, Super specialists with deep skills and expertise in a specific area, Uber, Airbnb...). Suddenly this became the truth that everyone started respecting. Hypes that go through cycles usually have an agenda owner/motive owner behind ( 'Cui Bono'). A truth that changes over time based on what is real at a specific point of time. Powerful people create a 'truth' that they want everyone to believe in. It is called truth based on a reference /authority/agenda or motive owner and is gone later when the reference/authority/agenda owner vanishes.

During multiple booms, markets, investors, governments and publics were seeing value where none existed. Dot Com boom until it got bust was glorified by everyone. Easy money based valuations in last few years made nations yearn for their own unicorns even if they were illusory. German government was praising Wirecard as a national icon until it was'nt. They were seeing something that did not exist. People who did not understand 'tech valuations' were branded luddites. This 'truth' has no basis and existence. It is an illusion.

The eternal truth is different from both the above. It neither depends on reference nor is illusory. It does not change with anything. Getting to this is not easy or straightforward. Before you get to this eternal truth, first you need to look at the current realities and see if they belong to any of the above and rule them out. Process of elimination gets you closer to the eternal truth. The clarity alone is worth the effort!

Metaverse and Money

 As Metaverse crystallizes, what could be the opportunities for money and finance ? Is it another hype inducing buzzword to sell technology and services? Or will it be too late to leverage , when ( and if ) it becomes real?

Approximately 100 years ago, 1920s marked the onset of great depression, spanish flu, epidemics, earthquakes and nobody would have predicted that 100 years later world would have been lot more prosperous, living longer and better, trillion dollar tech companies exploring alternative universes and electric cars. Yet here we are. As Metaverse takes shape, should we even bother?

Humans are possibly the only species that can dream and visualize worlds. our books and dreams help us expand our mental horizons, our simulators help us get trained, our games help us achieve fantasies and our fiction comics help us get entertained. Before we rubbish all these, the sheer businesses that comics/games/ comic character based movies generate is no laughing stock. The most successful ( almost guaranteed hit) theme for hollywood is Comic sequels. We are not as realists as we consider ourselves to be.

Money and the financial world has multiple opportunities to explore in Metaverse, given this background.

1. Conceivably, there would be metaverse natives ( just like digital native millennials) who engage in metaverse /web and mobile 2.0 seamlessly. For these generations, metaverse is not an odd ball but part of their digital lives. Offering financial services to them / managing their wealth/investments is an obvious area.
2. Metaverse can be an excellent test market for new offerings once there is enough 'population' and activity. Tiktok got its first billion users in half the time it took Facebook (Meta) to get.
3. Digital goods /services and their market ecosystems can be easily enabled in Metaverse which can be transacted through NFTs/ tokens/ digital barter and other tokenized value forms that are yet to emerge. Creating/valuing/enabling/accounting/holding are all opportunities for financial services firms.
4. Conceivably physical wealth/assets would be proxied in Metaverse and all of these need planning/management/optimization. Digital assets would also be part of estate planning for future generations as they hold value.
5. Traction will be followed by Regulation eventually and the participants need help in ensuring compliance.

1920s could not predict 2020s and the same is true going forward. Resilient enterprises need to keep experimenting and funding green shoots that keep them relevant as market cycles become shorter. Early bird gets the worm!!!

Mass, Speed and Impact

 Momentum is the product of mass and velocity: greater the momentum, greater the impact. For highest impact, highest possible mass and speed are needed. For organizations and markets chasing highest impact from innovation, greatest change ( mass) needs to happen at fastest speed ( velocity). Unfortunately world can handle neither.

Typically innovation starts at fringes. Main stream innovation is too much disturbance and can rock the boat. Another reason for this is the sheer resistance to change from various stakeholders. Status quo over time would have created and established ‘rent-seekers’ who wouldn’t like anything changed to their pension pots. since the rent seekers dominate status quo, the resistance posed by them to change is also massive. And that creates the exact opposite momentum for the innovation. Add the business vagaries /changing priorities/markets to the mix and one can see why the momentum is not high.

How to crack this conundrum?

1. Perspective: Understanding the above dynamic is a crucial step to know the baseline.
2. Passion and Perseverance: Two critical ‘P’s for any innovator whose importance cannot be overstated.
3. People: Knowing the stakeholders ( including the ‘rent seekers’ ) and figuring out/articulating ‘what is in it for each of them’, from the innovation.
4. Pareto’s Principle: Identify and focus on the 20% of the market that can create 80% mind share
5. Proof : Believing in innovation is different from proving it to others. Make sure the numbers and results justify the pain of change and make it the ‘right thing to do’.

Instant gratification digital economy has convinced everyone that all changes are fast. Ordering a cab on a mobile app and DNA sequencing/gene editing cannot be at the same pace. Fundamental/Tectonic shifts happen over longer periods but the impacts are also significantly higher at higher mass. Size of resistance is a proof of size of change and the size of benefits!!! Contrary to popular opinion, speed may be secondary.

More

Buzzword Factories

 Search Engine algorithms, Social Media, Online news have all made buzzwords more popular than before. And that hurts serious innovation.

Buzzword is a word or phrase, especially one connected with a particular subject, that has become fashionable and popular, and is used a lot in newspapers etc, as per Oxford Dictionary. They are now seen in most news articles, powerpoint presentations, resumes, youtube videos and websites. The shallowness associated with these creates disappointments, biases, perceptions that often cloud serious work.

An excellent example of this is AI. Today we see this more often than normal English word like bread. While the world is yet to successfully deploy autonomous driving / self sustaining Robots / make creative content at scale, we already seem to have artificially intelligent everything in our lives already. How is that even possible? Can any of the machines we use today, think on their own/ address situations they haven’t encountered before/ use intuition/ perceive threats and act subconsciously/ survive on their own…?

It is this disconnect that discredits AI due to the overuse of the buzzword. While every technology goes though its own hype cycle, the reckless use of buzzwords makes people look at everything as ‘Snake Oil’. Excess money chasing fewer startups and resulting funding of flaky business models canvassing buzzwords, does not help.

While all this happens, it should not affect serious exploration of what machines can learn and make our professional and personal lives easier. Just as all the buzz and the ups and downs of crypto currencies do not stop exploration of real world use cases of distributed ledger technology.

Let the buzzword factories do not discourage you from appreciating the true fundamental value of these technologies.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft predicted that Apple will never get any significant market share ( his estimate was 2–3%). Warren Buffet avoided tech stocks for decades and today Apple is his biggest holding.

Every new thing is not Apple but it’s not a Blackberry either!

Step In

 The song Jerusalema was viral last year. Everyone at home tried to learn the addictive dance steps. How many took the effort to bother about the meaning of the song? Tourists spend billions going around the world clicking snaps and posting Instagram stories. How many bother with the story behind the site and what its trying to teach us? Step in.

Seeming lack of time in ‘busy’ lives, pressure to do as much/more than the next person push us into trying so many things, many peripherally. When Yoga teaches us to get fit and control our senses/breath, what are we supposed to do with the fitter body and controlled mind? When gadgets /apps/tech make life easier for you, what are you supposed to do with the extra free time?

If we try to step in to spend a bit more time and focus, one would see that the purpose of everyone of the above is much more than we see. Let us go deeper and not stay outside. Life would be much more peaceful/happy/fulfilling.

Wishing everyone a more meaningful 2022!

Mass Producing Creativity

 Humans took solace for quite sometime with an assertion that machines cant get creative. Will machines take over this frontier too?

If we scan the creative pursuits that we come across in our daily lives, these include movies, fine arts, writing ( news, articles,stories), singing…. It was common perception that this is one area where machines cant steal jobs from humans. Lets dig deeper.

From the notes and beats, every music form has its own rules and structures. Movies have various elements ( emotion, thrill, twist,drama…), stories have acts and so on. Over time humans have created constructs for every one of the creative forms. More importantly, our reactions to these elements are more predictable than we think. The number of views on a song over its duration, the audience engagement to a movie scene with a particular element, the number of likes/shares/comments to an article based on its elements … all of these are now recorded in digital world and are open to analysis and pattern recognition.

The constructs and the predictable human reaction to their elements , enable a machine to create a creative art form that works. This is how algorithms are able to write movie scripts, journalistic articles and even compose songs , hitherto inconceivable. Granted they dont look/sound/read well but just like the recommendation algorithms on amazon, they will get better over time.

So what is left for humans to do?

That’s something humans should figure out faster than machines!